In the December 2013 issue of the Harvard Business Review, reporting and analytics guru Thomas Davenport writes about how far the innovators in the analytics field have advanced.
Davenport divides the evolution of analytics into three eras.
Analytics 1.0 – This first era was marked by the first widespread use of data to support fact-based decision making. The idea of data warehouses became more main stream as enterprises began to organize their internal data specifically for the purpose of better analyzing historical data.